Fisheries could be in hot water due to climate change

Warming waters are altering the distribution and abundance of fish species.

As our planet warms from excess carbon in the atmosphere, some of that heat is absorbed by the ocean. Fish and invertebrates are responding to warming waters by moving to higher latitudes or deeper waters where the water is cooler, and it was expected that these shifts would eventually affect availability of some commercially harvested species.

"Eventually" may be now. Ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades, according to a new study published in Nature. By looking at catch statistics, scientists discovered that the composition of species in fisheries around the world is already shifting and changing our menu.

Scientists compared the temperature preferences of 698 commercial fish species with the size of catches to develop an index known as the “mean temperature of the catch," and this index was used to evaluate the potential effects of climate change on fisheries. They found that water temperatures rose steadily every decade between 1970 and 2006 and that the mean temperature of the catch rose significantly in 52 large marine ecosystems, which cover the majority of the world’s coastal and shelf areas.

The United Kingdom has already seen a rapid increase in catches of red mullet, a warm-water species previously native to the Mediterranean but now found in waters as far north as Norway. While cold waters are now seeing more species from the tropics, there aren't any fish to replace those which are leaving. As waters become too hot for tropical species to tolerate, they will decrease in abundance due to their stunted aerobic capacity, which hinders their ability to grow and reproduce.

Changes in catch composition will have direct implications for coastal fishing communities, where the economy and food security often relies on fisheries. Subtropical developing counties will be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The study authors conclude that adaptation plans must be developed immediately to minimize the risk of ocean warming on the economy and food security.

Lets not forget that we are working hard to break the oceanic food chain as well by using the ocean as a garbage can. Add to that the shark "finning" that is taking place on a global scale. Once you remove the predators that keep the fish stocks healthy, diseases will wipe out what is left. The poor countries will suffer the worst. Communities that rely solely on fishing will be abandoned as the people move inland for food. If that requires them to cross a border, then you can bet that hostilities will ensue shortly after they arrive. Those that remain and try to make it work will only be displaced by the rising sea levels, so it is a lose-lose situation for them. But we won't care, just as long as our stocks pay a dividend every quarter.

As waters become too hot for tropical species to tolerate, they will decrease in abundance due to their stunted aerobic capacity, which hinders their ability to grow and reproduce.

That's for now. Over time - probably not a time useful for stuffing our bellies - these same species or others will adapt and evolve to tolerate much warmer water. The oceans of the earth were at times much hotter than they've been in human history, but we know they weren't empty.

Nature abhors a vacuum and life abhors empty real estate. Life will find a way to squat on (in) it.

As waters become too hot for tropical species to tolerate, they will decrease in abundance due to their stunted aerobic capacity, which hinders their ability to grow and reproduce.

That's for now. Over time - probably not a time useful for stuffing our bellies - these same species or others will adapt and evolve to tolerate much warmer water. The oceans of the earth were at times much hotter than they've been in human history, but we know they weren't empty.

Nature abhors a vacuum and life abhors empty real estate. Life will find a way to squat on (in) it.

Not this again? How many times must we say that the RATE of change is at the the heart of the issue?

Oceans warmed a few degrees over a million years. Life adapted. Now our actions are warming a few degrees over less than 100 years. Life can't adapt that quickly. A lot of it will die. Now. Some new life will emerge. Eventually. You tell the coastal fishing communities that their livelihoods will need to wait a million years for all the fish to figure out how to live in a hot ocean.

In our case, if humans are the frog, it seems as though we're noticing that we might be sitting in a pan of heating water. Now the question is: how to turn off the heat?

The real question is: How to turn off the heat without pissing off those who make profits by selling the gas for heating? In which "pissing off" means "cause them to fight with lies, corruption and everything they can think of to be able to continue selling you gas".

As you you already know, however, not all evolution proceeds at a snail's pace; we know now that sometimes it makes sudden leaps. Some life will continue in the oceans in spite of us and not mourn our demise when we're gone.

Is this the typical "nothing is happening" -> "something is happening but it's not us causing it" -> "something is happening and we are causing it but life will adapt (even if this means economies will collapse and people will starve)" school of thought?

Which always seems to have exactly one motivation: We can't and shouldn't do anything about it, either because there's no reason at all or because it's too late anyway. Drill, baby, drill?

At least it's a kind of progress, I guess. Yes, we will have to adapt and you obviously know it. Maybe the next step will be to understand that limiting the needed amount of adaption and the leaps you have to do is a really good idea.

Warming waters are altering the distribution and abundance of fish species.

Drop a frog in a boiling pan of water and watch it jump out. Put a frog in a pan of water and slowly raise the temperature, and watch it boil to death.

I dislike this for two reasons.

First: Frogs absolute do notice an increase in water temperature, and will attempt to escape. The original experiments done to create this myth, had included the removal of the frogs brain, to see if its autonomic nervous system would respond.

Thank you, l quite like it here. But I would like that people stopped pretending that GW is universally a bad thing. And that even those who would benefit from GW should foot the bill for the fight against something beneficial for them!

Our fishermen will catch more fish. Why exactly is this bad for us? We will export you the fish, money to us!

If this is how it will work it's hard to disagree. And if the US will be able to turn itself into an oil exporting nation by fracking CO2 won't be a very convincing argument. As always everyone will suffer except those who will profit.

But then rapid change is almost always bad. You may luck out but relying on that is rarely a good idea. The melting arctic and the changing jet streams may cause something very different from "warming" even in Russia.

Thank you, l quite like it here. But I would like that people stopped pretending that GW is universally a bad thing. And that even those who would benefit from GW should foot the bill for the fight against something beneficial for them!

Our fishermen will catch more fish. Why exactly is this bad for us? We will export you the fish, money to us!

Living on a planet with worsening starvation, political instability, and drowning coastal cities is going to be unpleasant for everyone - and if we're unlucky or unwise we won't get to live at all when the nukes fly because the unpleasantries get so bad we don't get along any more.

Warming waters are altering the distribution and abundance of fish species.

Drop a frog in a boiling pan of water and watch it jump out. Put a frog in a pan of water and slowly raise the temperature, and watch it boil to death.

I dislike this for two reasons.

First: Frogs absolute do notice an increase in water temperature, and will attempt to escape. The original experiments done to create this myth, had included the removal of the frogs brain, to see if its autonomic nervous system would respond.

Thank you, l quite like it here. But I would like that people stopped pretending that GW is universally a bad thing. And that even those who would benefit from GW should foot the bill for the fight against something beneficial for them!

Our fishermen will catch more fish. Why exactly is this bad for us? We will export you the fish, money to us!

Did you also enjoy the wildfires that ravaged Russia's crop production the last couple years? Do you think a few more fish and a milder winter will make up for that? Do you realize the downsides of mild winters, such as greater insect and pest survival? Or are you perhaps focusing on exactly one aspect that is itself dubious(more energy in a system can result in both more extreme winters and more extreme summers) and ignoring the fact that you are also in for a lot of hurt even in Russia as global warming increases?

I support global warming. In Russia, we wouldn't mind a few degrees warmer climate

Now I have to pay for heating and carbon tax for my heating. Why do I have to fight against lowering my heating bill? It hits me twice...

Depends on how this affects local weather patterns. You had some unusual mild and short winters lately?

I live in northern BC, Canada. We've started have more mild winters lately, which is kind of a nice thing when considering what -40C does to me. However at the same time, we've stopped having cold snaps that were killing off the pine beetle that has ravaged the local economy. Instead they can quite easily survive the winter and thrive in the summer, making them a much greater pest than before.

Sudden changes to climate are rarely a good thing, even in places as ball shrinkingly cold as this.

As waters become too hot for tropical species to tolerate, they will decrease in abundance due to their stunted aerobic capacity, which hinders their ability to grow and reproduce.

That's for now. Over time - probably not a time useful for stuffing our bellies - these same species or others will adapt and evolve to tolerate much warmer water. The oceans of the earth were at times much hotter than they've been in human history, but we know they weren't empty.

Nature abhors a vacuum and life abhors empty real estate. Life will find a way to squat on (in) it.

Not this again? How many times must we say that the RATE of change is at the the heart of the issue?

Oceans warmed a few degrees over a million years. Life adapted. Now our actions are warming a few degrees over less than 100 years. Life can't adapt that quickly. A lot of it will die. Now. Some new life will emerge. Eventually. You tell the coastal fishing communities that their livelihoods will need to wait a million years for all the fish to figure out how to live in a hot ocean.

No, I won't tell the subsistence fishermen that they can resume fishing if only they wait a million years. I'm not talking to them, and I'm also not apologizing or dismissing the stupid short-sighted mistakes that have been made, nor am I advocating doing nothing to correct them. As you you already know, however, not all evolution proceeds at a snail's pace; we know now that sometimes it makes sudden leaps. Some life will continue in the oceans in spite of us and not mourn our demise when we're gone. Will it be something we can stuff in our bellies and do so every week? Maybe not; we KNEW gross overpopulation would have consequences. To hell with your think-of-the-poor-fishermen hyperbole; they are just as much a part of the collective human problem as the rest of us. In fact, they should have been the canaries in the coal mines chirping the looming disaster decades before "global warming" was a thing. They stayed silent. Were even they too ignorant to notice? Supposedly those who are intimately connected to the land are blessed with great powers of ecosystem observation and intuition; was that all a lie and they're just as cursed with tunnel vision and greed as the rest of us?

I find it hard to believe that you actually think coastal fishing communities would have the power to shift a global conversation on climate change. Thousands upon thousands of scientists have brought their analytical powers to bear and come to the conclusion that yes, there is indeed anthropogenic climate change and yes, it indeed means bad news for human and non-human ecosystems alike. They haven't had much luck in pushing the governments of, say, the US, Canada and Australia to take truly strong, substantive measures to change it. Heck, the global insurance industry has been screaming (in their insurancy way) that climate change is here, that it's having effects now, and that those effects look to be getting more drastic over time. They haven't had a whole lot of luck getting some rather major governments to shift their stance, either. So to lay the blame for the current discourse around climate change on the shoulders of fishing communities, a large proportion of whom have a hard time getting their own local governments to, say, provide decent sanitary infrastructure, is misguided. Also, to simplistically inveigh against overpopulation without calling high-consuming individuals and societies to account seems to me to let those large consumers off the hook (whether you mean to or not). The whole thing smacks of blaming poor people — the ones arguably least responsible for climate change and with the least ability to fight it — for the mess us relatively rich folk have gotten us into.

I find it hard to believe that you actually think coastal fishing communities would have the power to shift a global conversation on climate change. Thousands upon thousands of scientists have brought their analytical powers to bear and come to the conclusion that yes, there is indeed anthropogenic climate change and yes, it indeed means bad news for human and non-human ecosystems alike. They haven't had much luck in pushing the governments of, say, the US, Canada and Australia to take truly strong, substantive measures to change it. Heck, the global insurance industry has been screaming (in their insurancy way) that climate change is here, that it's having effects now, and that those effects look to be getting more drastic over time. They haven't had a whole lot of luck getting some rather major governments to shift their stance, either. So to lay the blame for the current discourse around climate change on the shoulders of fishing communities, a large proportion of whom have a hard time getting their own local governments to, say, provide decent sanitary infrastructure, is misguided. Also, to simplistically inveigh against overpopulation without calling high-consuming individuals and societies to account seems to me to let those large consumers off the hook (whether you mean to or not). The whole thing smacks of blaming poor people — the ones arguably least responsible for climate change and with the least ability to fight it — for the mess us relatively rich folk have gotten us into.

our (australia's) next government (liberals = republicans) doesn't believe in manmade climate change or global warming . Looking like the libs will win a majority in both houses of parliament and will actively roll back alternative energy and anti-climate change measures along with privatising everything and copy the US healthcare model.

Lets not forget that we are working hard to break the oceanic food chain as well by using the ocean as a garbage can. Add to that the shark "finning" that is taking place on a global scale. Once you remove the predators that keep the fish stocks healthy, diseases will wipe out what is left. The poor countries will suffer the worst. Communities that rely solely on fishing will be abandoned as the people move inland for food. If that requires them to cross a border, then you can bet that hostilities will ensue shortly after they arrive. Those that remain and try to make it work will only be displaced by the rising sea levels, so it is a lose-lose situation for them. But we won't care, just as long as our stocks pay a dividend every quarter.

Throw in the overfishing and you have the perfect storm.

Communities that rely solely on fishing will have to be abandoned anyways. The sea levels are rising. Usually such communities are not built at a high elevation to withstand that.

And no, you are right, people will not care. Not unless they're personally affected.

Frogs absolute do notice an increase in water temperature, and will attempt to escape. The original experiments done to create this myth, had included the removal of the frogs brain, to see if its autonomic nervous system would respond.

so what you're saying is that we're actually rather less smart than frogs?

So to lay the blame for the current discourse around climate change on the shoulders of fishing communities, a large proportion of whom have a hard time getting their own local governments to, say, provide decent sanitary infrastructure, is misguided.

unfortunately, we can probably expect a lot more of this as people start to (see others) get bitten by climate change. why oh why didn't they warn us? it's their fault for not doing anything about it!

In our case, if humans are the frog, it seems as though we're noticing that we might be sitting in a pan of heating water. Now the question is: how to turn off the heat?

The real question is: How to turn off the heat without pissing off those who make profits by selling the gas for heating? In which "pissing off" means "cause them to fight with lies, corruption and everything they can think of to be able to continue selling you gas".

That's simple, YOU, as an individual, stop buying the gas! Why do you blame those that sell the product that YOU use???? All those people who live in the Northeast can just buy more blankets, right?

Allie Wilkinson / Allie is a freelance contributor to Ars Technica. She received a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Eckerd College and a Certificate in Conservation Biology from Columbia University's Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability.